The right is quickly slipping back into its conspiratorial nutjob posture that it had during the Clinton presidency, seeing black helicopters and one world UN government under their beds at every turn. As a friend of mine noted they were lunatics when the object of their ire was a white southerner. One can only wonder what someone they perceive as a black muslim intent on installing Sharia law will prompt them to do. And because these psychos form the activist base of the Republican party, congress will just encourage them.
Until they hurt somebody. Although that might not even stop them.
Blow (NYT): Pitchforks and Pistols
Lately I’ve been consuming as much conservative media as possible (interspersed with shots of Pepto-Bismol) to get a better sense of the mind and mood of the right. My read: They’re apocalyptic. They feel isolated, angry, betrayed and besieged. And some of their “leaders” seem to be trying to mold them into militias.
At first, it was entertaining — just harmless, hotheaded expostulation. Of course, there were the garbled facts, twisted logic and veiled hate speech. But what did I expect, fair and balanced? It was like walking through an ideological house of mirrors. The distortions can be mildly amusing at first, but if I stay too long it makes me sick.
But, it’s not all just harmless talk. For some, their disaffection has hardened into something more dark and dangerous. They’re talking about a revolution.
Some simply lace their unscrupulous screeds with loaded language about the fall of the Republic. We have to “rise up” and “take back our country.” Others have been much more explicit.
For example, Chuck Norris, the preeminent black belt and prospective Red Shirt, wrote earlier this month on the conservative blog WorldNetDaily: “How much more will Americans take? When will enough be enough? And, when that time comes, will our leaders finally listen or will history need to record a second American Revolution?”
Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, imagining herself as some sort of Delacroixian Liberty from the Land of the Lakes, urged her fellow Minnesotans to be “armed and dangerous,” ready to bust caps over cap-and-trade, I presume.
And between his tears, Glenn Beck, the self-professed “rodeo clown,” keeps warning of an impending insurrection by saying that he believes that we are heading for “depression” and “revolution” and then gaming out that revolution on his show last month. “Think the unthinkable” he said. Indeed.
All this talk of revolution is revolting, and it hasn’t gone unnoticed.
As the comedian Bill Maher pointed out, strong language can poison weak minds, as it did in the case of Timothy McVeigh. (We sometimes forget that not all dangerous men are trained by Al Qaeda.)
At the same time, the unrelenting meme being pushed by the right that Obama will mount an assault on the Second Amendment has helped fuel the panic buying of firearms. According to the F.B.I., there have been 1.2 million more requests for background checks of potential gun buyers from November to February than there were in the same four months last year. That’s 5.5 million requests altogether over that period; more than the number of people living in Bachmann’s Minnesota.
Coincidence? Maybe. Just posturing? Hopefully. But it all gives me a really bad feeling. (Where’s that Pepto-Bismol?!)
Benen: THE VOICE OF REASON?....
How far around the bend are conservatives enraged by Obama's presidency? They're so far gone, David Horowitz is urging them to calm down and stop using over-the-top rhetoric.Benen: TOO FAR FOR O'REILLY....I have been watching an interesting phenomenon on the right, which is beginning to cause me concern. I am referring to the over-the-top hysteria in response to the first months in office of our new president, which distinctly reminds me of the "Bush is Hitler" crowd on the left. [...]
Conservatives, please. Let's not duplicate the manias of the left as we figure out how to deal with Mr. Obama. He is not exactly the antichrist, although a disturbing number of people on the right are convinced he is. [...]
As we move forward, Obama faces increasingly tough choices in the wars against Islamic fascism in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Gaza and Iran. Hopefully, he will make the right choices, and should he do so conservatives will need to be there to support him. If he makes the wrong choices, conservatives will need to be there to oppose him. But neither our support nor our opposition should be based on hysterical responses to policies that we just don't like.
When David Horowitz is the voice of reason, telling the right to tone down the apocalyptic nonsense, you know conservative leaders have gone a little too far.
As Brendan Nyhan added the other day:
It's either cause for celebration or a sign of the apocalypse that Horowitz thinks Obama haters have gone too far. This is the man who created a website that purports to link mainstream Democrats to terrorists and anti-American dictators and who published an article written by an employee encouraging censorship of dissent after 9/11. Let's just say he's not known for rhetorical restraint.
We've reached the point at which Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity make David Horowitz look reasonable by comparison.
I never thought I'd see the day.
- From the comments:
Listening to the guys who pay attention to the NRA around here, it is possible to make inferences about the topics and tone of political discussions among the far right fringe. We should be alarmed. They have concluded that neither the demographics nor their institutional strength make a return to power likely within their lifetimes. They believe that they are the true Americans, and that the rest of us have usurped their authority (while somewhat racist, the hatred for "liberals" is central to their argument). They therefore reject the democratic choices we have made and are exploring concepts and language about their assertion of "rights" and the acceptable role of violence. It is not hard to see how terrorist cells could emerge. Posted by: Eric on April 4, 2009 at 9:27 AM | PERMALINK- more:
The NRA stuff for internal consumption is a lot more deranged than the sound bites that make the evening news:
www.boingboing.net/images/NR-F8_PERILFINAL.pdfAnd that was BEFORE the election. The gun shops out here are doing land office business with people buying up guns before Obama bans them all. There are a lot of people making a lot of money off this. Glenn Beck is simply the latest--but if the Colbert clipmontage is anything to judge by, he'll be the poster boy when the next free-lance militia outrage takes place.
Posted by: Steve Paradis on April 4, 2009 at 10:11 AM | PERMALINK
As extreme as Bill O'Reilly is, I'm starting to think even he has trouble tolerating Glenn Beck.John Cole on Glenn Beck’s AmericaA few weeks ago, Beck suggested "political correctness" pushed a madman to go on a shooting rampage in Alabama and kill 10 people. O'Reilly, listening to this deranged nonsense, actually began pushing back, saying he didn't buy it.
Yesterday, O'Reilly and Beck were chatting once again, and this time, O'Reilly seemed to be openly mocking Beck's notion of the government "slowly drifting into fascism."
When, on Fox News, Bill O'Reilly serves as the voice of reason, it's safe to say the network has reached a scary place.
I’m afraid we are going to see a lot more of this:
A man opened fire on officers during a domestic disturbance call Saturday morning, killing three of them, a police official said. Friends said he feared the Obama administration was poised to ban guns.Three officers were killed, said a police official at the scene who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. Police spokeswoman Diane Richard would only say that at least five officers were wounded, but wouldn’t give any other details.
***One friend, Edward Perkovic, said the gunman feared “the Obama gun ban that’s on the way” and “didn’t like our rights being infringed upon.” Another longtime friend, Aaron Vire, said he feared that President Obama was going to take away his rights, though he said he “wasn’t violently against Obama.”
Perkovic, a 22-year-old who said he was the gunman’s best friend, said he got a call at work from him in which he said, “Eddie, I am going to die today. ... Tell your family I love them and I love you.”
Perkovic said: “I heard gunshots and he hung up. ... He sounded like he was in pain, like he got shot.”
Vire, 23, said the gunman once had an Internet talk show but that it wasn’t successful. Vire said his friend had an AK-47 rifle and several powerful handguns, including a .357 Magnum.
And, of course, when you point out that certain individuals with all their talk about “revolution” and “armed insurrection” are inciting this kind of behavior in unstable people, you will get howls of protest about the 1st Amendment and what not. Sure, crazy people do crazy things. But that doesn’t make it responsible to encourage them, which is what a lot of really foolish people are doing right now for purely political reasons.
If nothing else, the next few years is going to mean full employment for Dave Neiwert.
Benen: BAUER DENOUNCES MUSLIM STAFFERS....
It's one thing to criticize specific members of the Obama administration because of ideology or policy differences. It's another to criticize would-be administration official who haven't even identified yet because of religious differences.Yesterday, Gary Bauer, a religious right leader and former Republican presidential candidate, wrote a column criticizing the mere possibility that the White House might hire aides who are Muslim. (via RWW).
During the presidential campaign, one of the stickiest rumors surrounding Barack Obama was that if he was elected, America could look forward to having a Muslim in the White House. Now that Obama is president, that rumor may prove correct.
President Obama says he's a Christian, but that doesn't mean he won't appoint Muslims to key positions in his administration in return for Muslim support during the election. Muslim groups are fretting that none have been appointed yet, and they want that to change. Polls showed about nine in 10 American Muslims voted for Obama last fall, and they want something to show for it. Don't be surprised if Obama gives them what they want.
Now, Bauer isn't complaining about specific Muslim officials in the administration. In fact, he didn't even say if there are any Muslim officials in the administration. He's all worked up, though, because the program coordinator for the Congressional Muslim Staffers Association bundled some resumes for White House consideration.
Bauer went on to argue that this is part of a preferred quota system -- which exists solely in Bauer's active imagination -- and that the left should be complaining about the separation of mosque and state.
This is so absurd, it's hard to even know where to start, but let's just quickly note that there is no quota system in place for administration officials, and hiring staffers for government jobs who happen to be religious is not a violation of the First Amendment. What's more, there's no evidence of any political "payback," rewarding Muslim groups for their support with Muslim staffers.
No, this is just ugly narrow-mindedness from a right-wing leader engaged in the most obnoxious kind of identity politics.
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